Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It’s the dead of winter in Stockholm and I’m sitting in a very small room inside the very inaptly named Calm Body Modification clinic. A few feet away sits the syringe that will, soon enough, plunge into the fat between my thumb and forefinger and deposit a glass-encased microchip roughly the size of an engorged…
On the web, content fraudsters run sites that generate millions of views, get hundreds of thousands of fans, and even claw their way up to the top of search pages. Some of these sites are nothing but one person. With low cost cash grabs taking over search and social how can publishers win? To fix…
Start Article Post Content UPDATED: The prognosis on SoundCloud, the popular but financially strapped streaming service, has been grim for all of 2017, with 40 percent of its staff laid off last week and statements from its founders that it may not have enough money to see it through the year. According to a report…
The challenges of getting a portable digital television to actually show a working signal stand in strong contrast to the analog days. When it comes to technology, I have a lot of love for edge cases—situations where the march of innovation actually makes things a little bit worse. Which means that I’ve become a pretty…
Peter Thiel at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, 2011. Photo credit: Getty Images. When Inc. magazine’s Jeff Bercovici reported last August that billionaire Trump-supporter Peter Thiel had repeatedly expressed interest in the idea of harvesting the blood of young people to maintain his own youth, it left an indelible mark on Thiel’s public persona, as…
This week, according to the Information, Jawbone shut down. That’s the company, valued at $3 billion, that brought us the Up fitness bands. So here’s the thing: Microsoft discontinued its fitness band in 2016. Nike discontinued its Fuel band in 2015. Meanwhile, Fitbit, the biggest remaining seller of fitness bands, is having a tough time….
Anyone who spends time on Instagram knows that celebrities are doing #ads, and also that there are lots of times a celebrity is clearly doing an ad but isn’t really admitting it, which is kind of shady. But there’s never been an attempt to actually find out how much #spon is out there – and…
GIF Image Credit: Elena Scotti/Gizmodo/GMG, photos via Shutterstock In 2009, Gary Olhoeft walked into a Best Buy to buy some DVDs. He walked out with his whole body twitching and convulsing. Olhoeft has a brain implant, tiny bits of microelectronic circuitry that deliver electrical impulses to his motor cortex in order to control the debilitating…
Agencies are not transparent about their actions. Agencies recommend media that is off-strategy when it works for their gain. Agencies accrue media earned by advertisers’ spending and resell it to other advertisers. Agencies demand pay-for-play from vendors in order to be recommended, and cross the line in partnership relationships. These are among the claims made…
Facebook embraced sound-on autoplay videos, just months before Google and Apple said they were banning these formats on their platforms as unacceptable UX intrusions. By Tony Haile on June 27, 2017 6:30 am Facebook has a problem. What has driven its growth for the last five years won’t drive its growth for the next…